Wednesday, 12 August 2009

How-To: Compile and Install Latest VLC in Debian Lenny

This tutorial will show how to compile and install the latest VLC from source in Debian Lenny in several steps. The current version at the time of writing is VLC 1.0.1, so the tutorial should work successfully for it.

1. Install the development packagesAs root, type the following two commands:

The first one will install the meta package build-essential, which depends on compilation tools, while the latter will install development libraries needed to compile VLC.

3. Make a symbolic link in /usr/libMake a symbolic link in /usr/lib/ which will point to the libGL library. This may depend on which driver you have installed. You may not need to do this step. For example, I used here:

ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.173.14.09 /usr/lib/libGL.so

2. Download the source codeDownload the VLC source tarball from the official website (direct link here) and uncompress it:

tar -xjf vlc-1.0.1.tar.bz2

4. Compile and installNow make sure the current working directory is vlc-1.0.1 and issue the following commands:

The last command as root. Without the switches --disable-nls and --disable-mozilla I got the error configure: error: Buggy GNU/libc (version 2.5 - 2.7) present. VLC would crash; there is no viable work-around for this. so I had to disable them.

Finally, run ldconfig as root:

ldconfig

This should be all. Run VLC by typing vlc in a terminal or hitting Alt+F2 and typing vlc in the run box that appears.

You can also install as normal user by changing the installation prefix, e.g.: